A storage area network is a network of storage devices or disks. A storage area network can connect one or more servers (host servers) to a centralized pool of disk storage (storage devices or storage volumes). Compared to managing many servers, each with a storage device, use of a storage area network improves system administration.
Although storage area network technology has proven to be useful, it would be desirable to present additional improvements. Conventional methods of managing storage area networks comprise low level primitives (i.e., machine language) that require considerable expertise in storage subsystems, networks, etc. Storage administrators frequently make mistakes in performing these operations.
Furthermore, storage administrators have difficulty in correlating various components such as, for example, host servers and storage devices in a storage area network. A system administrator has to perform mappings between servers and storage devices. Each server and each storage device represents an individual mapping. With many servers and many storage devices, managing issues such as consistent mapping, security, and access are very difficult to configure and maintain.
Conventional storage area networks lack a unifying abstraction for the entities in the storage area network. What is therefore needed is a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for automatically relating components of a storage area network in a volume container. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied.